Acad’s Net suit in storage

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has dropped its lawsuit against Network Solutions Inc., which registers names on the Internet, for allowing the domains “academyaward.com” and “oscar.net” to be registered to other groups or people.

The academy decided to drop its suit when a U.S. District Court judge denied its motion for a preliminary injunction against NSI last week. “We didn’t think it would be fruitful to pursue this matter further, at least for the time being,” said Ric Robertson, AMPAS’ executive administrator.

NSI is currently involved in several court actions involving its business of assigning new or registering unused Internet domain names, but so far no definitive legal precedent has been established in this admittedly new area of electronic trademarking.

Robertson added that it was possible that the academy would take up its complaint against NSI at some later date.